Saturday, 23 November 2013

Daily Mail"In less than six weeks, unless there is a decisive Government U-turn, Britain, as required by the European Union, will throw open its jobs market to the 29 million citizens of Romania and Bulgaria.
It’s a development which could have the most considerable implications for the Prime Minister, British society and, most importantly, this country’s one million unemployed young people.
Yet David Cameron and his ministers are approaching January 1 with a head-in-the-sand insouciance which is so sadly typical of a political class that is increasingly remote from the lives and concerns of ordinary voters.
Incredibly, the Government has refused to estimate how many migrants will arrive. .......Salford University research reveals Britain already has one of the largest Roma populations (which includes migrants from Romania and Bulgaria) in Western Europe — with about 200,000 living here.
That figure, typically, is four times higher than the Government’s own estimates.
Worryingly, MigrationWatch UK chairman Sir Andrew Green, whose research has proved painstakingly accurate over the past decade, is predicting 50,000 arrivals every year from Romania and Bulgaria from January 1.
Over five years, that is the equivalent of the population of a city the size of Hull."

Zdnet"Operating systems are commodities that are free or almost free - like device drivers are today. Say goodbye to Windows revenue.
Servers and tools will become more important as apps, computes and storage move to the cloud - public or private - to enable powerful mobile user capabilities. But MS has to move cross-platform or lock themselves out of the fast growing Linux server space.
MS isn't going to win the ad battle against Google. Stop trying.
Office will be the 8-track tape of business apps in 10 years. Few people need what it does - file compatibility is the sales driver, not features - and as Google Docs and other apps proliferate at much lower cost, more people will leave."

Wednesday, 20 November 2013

Telegraph"Bit late on this, but a report this week by the management consultancy McKinsey has attempted to quantify the distributional consequences of central bank asset purchases (so-called quantitative easing) which I referred to in my column this morning. Pretty terrifying reading it makes too, hammering home the point that QE has been extremely beneficial to indebted governments and other borrowers, but on the whole very damaging to households, particularly elderly ones reliant on fixed income forms of saving. ........QE has resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from households the governments. And they say central banks are meant to be independent."

Tuesday, 19 November 2013

"Wholly predictable last week was the ghoulish eagerness of the warmists
(including David Cameron) to blame the Philippines typhoon disaster on
“man-made climate change”. Those sceptics who actually consult the evidence
wearily pointed out that in recent years tropical storm activity, including
Pacific typhoons, has been less intense than for decades; and that Asia was
hit by even worse typhoons in the past, notably in the late 17th century, at
the height of the “Little Ice Age” when the world was much colder than it is
now.
Meanwhile, in Warsaw, 10,000 officials and climate activists are gathered
under the auspices of the UN, in yet another desperate attempt to agree that
we must all be taxed and regulated into further reducing our “carbon
emissions”. An innovation this time, however, was a 50,000-strong mass
demonstration nearby, in support of a “counter-conference” sponsored by
Solidarity and other Polish groups, to protest at how the UN’s bogus science
is being used to “deceive the world”. As the country that relies more on
coal for its electricity than any other in Europe, Poland is leading the way
in resisting the pressure for the EU to commit economic suicide by raising
its insane “carbon-reduction targets” even higher — pressure led by our own
Government.
When can we hope to see 50,000 people turning out in Britain to protest that
we have the most idiotically self-destructive energy and “climate” policies
in the world?"

Sunday, 10 November 2013

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)"Even as President Barack Obama sold a new health care law in part by assuring Americans they would be able to keep their insurance plans, his administration knew that tens of millions of people actually could lose those their policies."

Saturday, 2 November 2013

Telegraph"It wasn't meant to be like this. When the Fed launched QE, this policy experiment was supposed to be limited to an ex nihilo monetary injection of $600bn (£377bn). Even if the tapering had started in September, as was widely expected, the total would have topped $4,000bn by next spring."

Telegraph"The EU has completely destroyed the sovereign right of national governments to levy tax in a country where income is earned ..... It all stems from the “four freedoms” laid down in the founding treaty of the European Union, especially the freedoms of “capital” and “establishment”, which entitle firms to move all their income to the country where they want their tax base to be, to give them the smallest tax liability. This has completely destroyed the sovereign right of national governments to levy tax in a country where income is earned. Google, Amazon, Apple and the rest can thus quite legally channel all their earnings wherever tax rates are lowest.
In 1992, a further massive loophole was opened up by the Maastricht Treaty, which, in preparation for the single currency, extended the “freedom of capital” to countries outside the EU, including tax havens such as the Cayman Islands or Jersey, with even lower tax rates. This is how, for instance, our water companies manage to pay so little tax, despite making profits averaging at 30 per cent a year. They have also learnt the cleverest trick of all, which is to borrow huge sums from their tax-haven-based owners, at artificially high rates of interest, which can then be offset as a business expense against their profits, shrinking their tax liability still further.
Even more disturbing is the way no one ever publicly admits that this is what makes such a colossal racket perfectly legal."

The Hockey Schtick" Most of the 18 hospitals on this year's U.S. News and World Report's Honor Roll will accept insurance from just one or two companies selling plans on the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) insurance exchanges, according to a Watchdog.org investigation."